The reward eventually reached $1.2 million, a very large sum given that there wasn’t any real need for an incentive to push people over the edge from covering up Chris Dorner’s whereabouts to ratting him out to the cops.  It would be fair to assume that anyone who had knowledge of where to find Chris Dorner would have happily called the cops to let them know.

So why offer such a big reward?  I  offered a theory before his killing.

The latest word is that the LAPD has  offered a $1 million reward for the capture of Dorner, together with re-opening his dismissal from the force and a promise that if he surrenders, he won’t be harmed. LA Police Commissioner Charlie Beck announced:

If you don’t, if you decide to try to take the life of another Los Angeles police officer or their family member, then you’ll have to suffer the consequences.”

Apparently, the message is that if they capture Dorner, they will kill him as punishment.  This trio is really comprised of two messages, one for Dorner and the other for public consumption. The reward is for the benefit of the public, who hasn’t taken kindly to the LAPD shooting people for no particularly good reason. So they are offering a lottery. You gotta be in it to win it, and who couldn’t use a cool mil?  It’s hard to imagine they would ever pay out a million dollars, but it’s the first sign of giving anything back to the community and it’s all they’ve got.

Even then, there was no real expectation that it would come to pass.  While the virtue of offering makes for great public relations, the cost of actually paying out big bucks, after the headlines are over and the public has moved on to other, newer, interests is too steep.  And so it proved to be true here.

As noted by the AP via Fox News, the great humanitarians who offered the huge rewards are dropping like flies.

An umbrella group for California police unions says it is pulling its contribution to a $1.2 million reward offered in the hunt for rogue ex-cop Christopher Dorner.

The president of the 64,000-member Peace Officers Research Association of California says the organization’s board of directors voted Thursday to withdraw $50,000 from the huge amount collected from more than two dozen entities.

How does that language strike you, “voted…to withdraw”?  After it’s over, they say “never mind” and just don’t pay. But the cop group isn’t the only one. The City of Riverside pulled its $100,000 reward as well.  Why?

Ron Cottingham says the conditions for the reward to be issued — Dorner’s arrest and conviction — don’t apply.

Got that? Dorner was killed rather than arrested and convicted. As if anybody thought the LAPD was going to let Dorner live and face trial, but that’s merely an aside. The “terms” of the reward was for information “leading to the arrest and conviction of Christopher Dorner.”  Since he was neither arrested nor convicted, because he’s dead, they’re off the hook.

As tricky legal arguments go to escape liability for paying out the reward, after the huge public stink made over it, this isn’t the best around.  When the claimants for the reward called the police to inform them of where Dorner was located, they provided information leading to his arrest and conviction.  The language related to what lawyers call a “condition subsequent,” something that would happen after the fact.  But it wasn’t such a condition, as the informant had no control over whether the condition would come to pass.

Forget that Dorner didn’t survive to be arrested, a choice made entirely by others.  What if he had been arrested, tried and convicted?  The informants have no control over a jury verdict. Would that have been sufficient to negate the obligation to pay?  What if he was convicted, but he appealed and while the appeal was pending, Dorner died of a heart attack in prison, thus abating the conviction by reason of death. The deal is off?  Or maybe a really far-fetched notion, that it was later determined that Dorner wasn’t the right guy, and they dropped the case. Nothing, right?

By providing the information that brought police to Dorner’s location, the informants did precisely what the terms of the reward required of them.  They gave the cops information that led to Dorner’s arrest and conviction, if those conditions came to pass.  That they condition subsequent didn’t happen, couldn’t happen because he was dead is irrelevant to what the informants did. They fulfilled their part of the bargain. They made the call and placed the police in the position of making the condition happen. Or not, as it turned out. But that fell entirely on the cops shoulders, not the informants.

The option now is for the informants, Karen and Jim Reynolds, who escaped Dorner in their Big Bear Lake condo, and  Rick Heltebrake, whose pickup truck was carjacked by Dorner, to sue the various entities who were such big shots when they offered the money, and such sniveling weasels now that the time has come to pay the reward out.  It’s likely that they never thought that calling the cops on Dorner was the prelude to a lawsuit against some cop group who liked to hold press conferences to announce how deeply they cared.

The public relations incentive of putting these huge reward numbers out there when the nation was focused on Dorner was huge.  Now, it’s just a wasted expense that would be far better used to buy a new police tank, a stingray or some drones.  Suddenly, the story turns on an irrelevant condition subsequent, as if they found a technicality that lets them off the hook.  What they really mean to say is they have a colorable basis to reneg on the deal and shift the burden onto the claimants to spend the next ten years litigating the issue.

While we were all impressed with how dedicated and sincere these contributors to the Dorner reward were at the time it was on the front burner, we can now see how it plays out after-the-fact when they are expected to put their money where their mouth is.  Are you surprised?